John Hendrickson - Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter

You know, you dont have to do this, Jeff says. His voice has a fatherly tone. You and I could get out of here. We could go get breakfast. Hes kidding, but not really. If I say yes, Jeff will say okay, and well ride the elevator down to the lobby and not speak of it again. It will just be one of those days, another morning when I vanish rather than talk.

He leans against the makeup counter with his back to the mirror. My face is caked in concealer, but I can still see my acne scars, the dark circles under my eyes, my imperfect shave. I look scared, like a little boy getting a haircut who shrinks into the swivel chair as the clippers buzz toward his ears. Jeff is my boss; I can tell hes concerned. I want to take him up on his offer. I want to stand and leave and forget about all of this.

Eventually he says good-bye and good luck and pats my shoulder on his way out the door. I walk over to the little room where Im supposed to wait. When I was young, my life was defined by little rooms. There was the speech therapists office with the mysterious wall-length mirror. There was the windowless room in the basement of my elementary school. Everyone in class knew I went to the little room, but nobody wanted to bring it up. I never brought it up either, because maybe if I ignored the problem hard enough, it would disappear. Thats what we were all hoping forme, my mom, my dad, my brother. Weve spent decades waiting for this strange thing to exit my body and drift away. For dozens of reasons, it has stuck around.

Ive avoided almost anything resembling public speaking my entire life. But now Im here, sweating through my shirt as the minutes tick by before they call me onto the set. My knee is bouncing uncontrollably. Im staring at the floor, sipping a lukewarm black coffee that I struggled to order at Dunkin Donuts earlier this morning. The cashier flashed me a familiar pity smile.

I stayed late at my office last night, sitting across the table from Helen, a public-relations person at my company. We entered a little room on the sixth floor and she turned on a fake newscaster voice to lead me in a mock interview. I couldnt get through one answer. She kept pushing me forward.

Lets run through it again, she said.

Okay, try again.

Again?

I couldnt start sentences. Id break eye contact. Id fiddle with a pen as a distraction to help me get to the next word. I wanted to leave, but she stayed, so I stayed. We began again and I reached for the pen. Helen, with sweetness and sadness and grace, said, Lets try one with nothing in your hands.

The reason Im in this little room today, MSNBCs Midtown Manhattan green room, is because twenty-four hours ago my life changed. I had spent nearly thirty years hiding from one wordthe s word. Youve already figured out the word. Ive spent paragraphs avoiding the act of typing it. When youre young, you internalize that stutter is an ugly word. Everything about stutter is weird: those three ts, that uh in the middle that makes you think of dumb. Stutter lands with a thud, like gimp or retard. Your instinct is to run from stutter, to move the conversation away from stutter. Stutter is painful and awkward and something nobody wants to talk about.

Today is Friday, November 22, 2019. Im here because yesterday I published an article in The Atlantic about the man who has become the most famous living stutterer, and Im about to do something Ive never considered doing: talk on TV. Just under twelve months from now, Joe Biden will be elected president of the United States. He somehow made it this far without tens of millions of people realizing not only that he stuttered as a young boy, but that he still stutters as an old man. There are dozens of writers at my publication who are more talented than me, more deserving than me, more qualified than me to interview the next president. I landed the assignment for the sole reason that I stutter, too.